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The last thing Lt. Col. Charles Callahan did before leaping from his plunging U.S. Air Force C-45 the evening of Sept. 11, 1952, was to set an autopilot course he hoped would guide the empty airplane to a crash landing in a remote spot where no one would be hurt.

As plane crashes go, it was a wild success. The C-45 traveled 65 miles with no one aboard and crashed in Lake Ontario near Oswego, where it was recently discovered underwater after lying undisturbed and undetected for 62 years.

The discovery was made by the shipwreck exploration team of Jim Kennard of Perinton and Roger Pawlowski of Gates, who have used sophisticated sonar equipment to find a variety of sunken vessels in the Great Lakes. They were looking for historic sunken ships when they found the airplane, much farther from shore than had been originally reported when it first crashed, according to a news release announcing the discovery.

The plane and its five-person crew was on a routine flight from Bedford, Mass., to Griffis Air Force Base near Rome when it faltered and crashed. All five people parachuted to safety; the pilotless plane buzzed over Oswego before crashing into the lake.

Pawlowski grew up in Tonawanda, Erie County, and remembered riding his bicycle to the Niagara Falls airport to watch the planes take off. One day, a pilot saw him and gave him a ride in the co-pilot's seat of a B-18, the commercial version of the C-45.

It was his first time in an airplane; he later went on to a 27-year career in the Air Force.

"It was just a guy giving a kid a ride," he said. "That went a long way toward boosting my interest in airplanes."

The 34-foot-long airplane is still mostly intact on the bottom of the lake, according to sonar images. Wrecks like that one are the property of New York state.